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Earlier this month, Rep. Pete Olson appeared on Houston’s “The Sam Malone Show” to attack President Obama over his reaction to the Umpqua Community College shooting in Oregon.

The Texas Republican said that the president spoke with “no factual information” about the massacre and simply thought, “Hey, it’s a crisis and that’s good politics for me.”

After addressing the conflicting reports about whether the perpetrator targeted Christians, Olson managed to link the massacre to Obama’s response to the case of Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, who was temporarily placed in the custody of U.S. Marshals after she repeatedly refused court orders to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

“Enough of our President Obama about bigotry, about attacking people for their religions,” he said, “I mean good gosh, he sat on the sidelines with Ms. Davis there in Kentucky, he just sat by and sat by and let her get thrown in prison for following her religious beliefs.”

In an interview last month with Houston-based talk radio host Sam Malone, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, blasted plans to bring in vetted refugees from the Syrian conflict to the U.S., doubting that they would be genuine refugees and insisting that President Obama and “Chamberlain Kerry” only want them for their votes.

Poe said that while the Obama administration “won’t take care of our veterans,” it will “open the doors to people we don’t even know.”

“It’s a political maneuver on the part of the president just to get more people in the U.S. so they’ll support the Democratic Party, I think it’s a long-term goal,” he said.

Inveterate conspiracy theorist Rick Wiles invited two prominent anti-immigration activists onto his “ Trunews” program yesterday to discuss attempts to resettle the millions of refugees from Syria’s civil war, but couldn’t get too far into the discussion before announcing that someone “orchestrated” the refugee crisis in order to destroy “the existing order.”

The refugee crisis, along with the “contrived, orchestrated, choreographed crisis” of unaccompanied Central American children fleeing to the southern U.S. border last year, he said, must be part of a grand plot run by “somebody with a lot of money.”

“I am convinced all of this is orchestrated,” he said. “Somebody with a lot of money wants a chaotic scene in the world, they want mass migration. It’s breaking down borders, sovereignty, culture, it’s destroying the existing order.”

Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, who was making her second appearance on Wiles’ program, responded cautiously, saying, “Well, I don’t know if it’s orchestrated, but it is obvious that there are organizations with an ideological agenda who are certainly taking advantage of it to push their political and ideological aims.”

Refugee Resettlement Watch’s Ann Corcoran seemed more willing to embrace Wiles’ theory, saying, “I hope someday we will find out who it is behind this and who these powers are” but that in the meantime, she agrees with Vaughan.

Zmirak said that while countries like the U.S. and Israel are founded on the right to bear arms (Israel actually has much tougher gun laws than the U.S.), Europeans will only take up individual arms when they are forced to fight “an inevitable civil war” against “millions of Muslim immigrants.”

“If the government fails, if they don’t deport these millions of Muslim immigrants someday, the individual people are going to have to take arms,” he said. “I’m afraid that we’re looking at an inevitable civil war in Europe, when the Muslims take power and the remaining non-Muslims fight back. I’m not optimistic about the future of Europe.”

Having a warrant out for his arrest isn’t stopping Ron Luce, the founder of Teen Mania Ministries, from going on a national TV. Last week, Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) hosted Luce on its flagship televangelist broadcast, “Praise the Lord,” where Luce, unsurprisingly, didn’t face any questions about a financial scandal surrounding his ministry.

Teen Mania has close ties to right-wing groups and politicians — including receiving an enthusiastic endorsement from Rick Santorum — who are desperate to find young people to campaign against supposed evils like gay marriage, despite accusations that the group employs cult-like practices.

A Colorado court issued a warrant for Luce’s arrest after he failed to appear for a breach of contract lawsuit, which he said he did on the advice of his lawyers.

“They’re now at a point where they can’t pay back people,” according to one of the group’s former directors. “People are being suckered.”

Luce is facing lawsuits outside of Colorado as well, WORLD Magazine reports:

Individuals and churches continue to report paying for events that end up being canceled and not receiving refunds. Some say they were offered a small percentage of the amount owed but returned it because they didn’t receive assurance that the rest would come later.

“I’m angry because they are continuing to hurt others,” said Pennsylvania resident Jolie Roth. “They are continuing to steal and lie from fellow Christians ‘in the name of Jesus.’”

Last year, after Teen Mania’s 472-acre property went into foreclosure, the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability revoked its membership. ECFA president Dan Busby declined to comment on Teen Mania’s current situation but noted ministries in decline often miss the window of opportunity to merge with another ministry: “As a result, the ministry ends up in a free fall.”

With Election Day two weeks away in Virginia, People For the American Way (PFAW) today launched a Spanish-language radio ad covering Northern Virginia including the pivotal State Senate District 29 that encourages voters to cast a ballot against GOP extremism on Election Day. The ad focuses on how Latino voters in Virginia have the first chance to stand against that the anti-immigrant rhetoric from Donald Trump and the Republican Party on a national and local level.

PFAW Political Director Randy Borntrager explained:

“Virginia voters have the first opportunity in the country to push back against the immigrant bashing from Donald Trump and the Republican Party as a whole by turning out to vote against Republicans come Election Day 2015.”

PFAW Coordinator of Political Campaigns Carlos A. Sanchez added:

“By highlighting in Spanish how local and national Republican politicians from Ken Cuccinnelli to Donald Trump have demonized immigrants, our ad urges voters to stand up against them by going to the polls on November 3rd.”

The ad is part of PFAW’s Latinos Vote! program and will run through Election Day in Northern Virginia, encompassing the critical State Senate District 29. In addition to the radio ad, civil rights icon and PFAW board member Dolores Huerta will be traveling to Virginia at the end of October as part of our efforts get out the vote among Latino voters in Virginia.

MOM: Pass me the salt. Time to vote, mi'jita.*
DAUGHTER: Oh, what for mom?
MOM: What do you mean what for? For starters, to shut Trump's big mouth.
DAUGHTER: Really?
MOM: Yeah, "really". Or do you agree with what he says about Hispanics?
DAUGHTER: You know I don't.
MOM: And tell me: Do you want your children to have pre-school, that they get a good education and are able to attend college for a cost that’s reasonable?
DAUGHTER: Of course I do
MOM: Well, these are the kind of decisions you are supporting with your vote. That's why we have to vote for the democrats. And even more in local elections.
MOM: Because Trump is not the only one. Republicans in Virginia have proposed tracking immigrants like packages and even compared us to rats!
DAUGHTER: Unbelievable.
MOM: Yes. That’s why we have to vote for Democrats and say NO to Trump and the Republicans mi'ja. On November 3rd.
DAUGHTER: Mom, you are right. We have to vote.
VO DISCLAIMER: People For the American Way sponsored this ad.
*Mi'jita is an expression/short for "my little daughter"

This is the first in a series of posts about the upcoming World Congress of Families in Salt Lake City, Utah. In this post, we provide an introduction to the event’s hosts and recipients of its awards for international activism. Subsequent posts will explore the World Congress of Families’ organizing against LGBT equality and women’s rights and its role in growing international social conservative networks.

Next week, hundreds of activists from around the world will gather in Salt Lake City for the ninth World Congress of Families, a gathering of individuals and organizations promoting what organizers call the “natural family.”

The World Congress of Families is a project of the Illinois-based Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, founded in 1997 by conservative historian Allan Carlson. The Howard Center has a relatively small budget — less than half a million dollars in 2013 — but works with organizers and funders in host countries to throw what it calls the “Olympics” of social conservatism. This is the first time the Congress has been held in the U.S. and will count as guests the governor of Utah as well as Rafael Cruz, father of Texas senator and Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz. The event is set to honor activists who advocated for laws criminalizing homosexuality and even meetings between gay people, free speech in favor of gay rights and abortion.

The vision of the “natural family” promoted by WCF is one that excludes LGBT people and precludes reproductive rights. In 2005, Carlson and the Sutherland Institute’s Paul Mero released “The Natural Family: A Manifesto,” a call to arms against the societal changes that resulted from the twin developments of “industrialism and the assault of new, family-denying ideas.”

They offered instead a vision of a return to an economy run by large families operating as independent economic units — a potentially appealing thought until you realize what the economy they envision means for women. In Carlson’s and Mero’s “natural family” dream, they “envision young women growing into wives, homemakers, and mothers; and we see young men growing into husbands, homebuilders, and fathers.” For women, this involves rejecting what they call the “contraceptive mentality” and opening their homes to “a full quiver of children” — a nod to the “Quiverfull” ideology promoted by the self-proclaimed “Christian patriarchy” movement. They insist that “culture, law, and policy” should take into account that “women and men are equal in dignity and innate human rights, but different in function” — a separate-but-equal ideology that drives women out of public and economic life and rejects the rights of those who do not fit into this narrow view of gender roles.

It is this vision that WCF aims to promote around the world, through government policies aiding the “natural family” and in resisting international efforts to protect the rights of women and LGBT people.

The U.S. event offers WCF an opportunity to reestablish itself after the debacle of the last Congress, which was meant to be held in Moscow — home of a spate of new anti-LGBT laws — but was abruptly “suspended” after Russia invaded Ukraine and some of the conference’s organizers were hit with U.S. sanctions. The conference went ahead, but without the official World Congress of Families label. Instead, WCF leaders attended in their personal capacities. The executive director of the Utah event is Janice Shaw Crouse, a former Concerned Women for America official who appears to have parted ways with her former employer over the wisdom of participating in the Moscow summit.

Hosting the World Congress of Families gathering in Salt Lake City is the Sutherland Institute, which describes itself as “a conservative public policy think tank” whose mission is “to shape Utah law and policy based on a core set of governing principles.” The Sutherland Institute, whose budget is about $1.5 million, is affiliated with the State Policy Network, a group of right-wing think tanks. While the Institute is not formally affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the LDS or Mormon Church), it promotes conservative views influenced by LDS theology, sometimes staking out policy positions to the right of the Church itself. The Institute is named for George Sutherland, a U.S. Supreme Court justice from Utah who joined other conservative justices to overturn progressive legislation in the 1920s and led a group known as “The Four Horsemen” who struck down FDR’s New Deal for several years.

Sutherland describes seven principles of “authentic conservatism” – personal responsibility as the basis of self-government; family as the fundamental unit of society; religion as the moral compass of human progress; private property as the cornerstone of economic freedom; free markets as the engine of economic prosperity; charity as the wellspring of a caring community; limited government as the essence of good government. The Institute brags about its work to weaken unions and calls for the abolition of the state income tax on corporations.

In other words, the Institute promotes both the Tea Party’s hostility to government regulation and the Religious Right’s desire to use government to promote “traditional” views of family, parenting, and marriage.Sutherland helped pay for the legal counsel hired by the state to defend its anti-gay-marriage amendment.

The Institute called the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling an “abdication” of the rule of law. Then-President Paul Mero, argued that freedom is incompatible with gay rights, because “bad behavior is the enemy of freedom.” Sutherland supports Sen. Mike Lee’s First Amendment Defense Act, which would allow broad anti-gay discrimination in the name of religious liberty. It also wants to do away with no-fault divorce laws.

In 2014 the Institute produced a 10-page defense of a Utah law requiring restaurants to erect a “Zion Curtain” or “Zion Wall” to prevent restaurant-goers from being able to witness the preparation of alcoholic beverages. Although Sutherland was criticized for supporting what many considered “nanny-state” legislation, former President Paul Mero said the law “disrupts a culture of drinking” and promotes a “culture of sobriety.”

The Sutherland Institute has strong ties with WCF’s sponsor, the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society. Mero, the founding executive vice president of the Howard Center, reportedly helped attract the WCF to Salt Lake City. After 14 years as Sutherland’s CEO he was asked to step down by the Institute’s board last August, for what were described as operational rather than philosophical differences. Mero reportedly agreed to continue to serve on executive committee for the WCF. Sutherland board chair and interim president Stanford Swim serves on the boards of the Howard Center and the State Policy Network.

This year, the World Congress of Families will present its Woman of the Year Award to Theresa Okafor, Familia Et Veritas awards to Luca Giuseppe Volonte and Andrea Williams and an International Pro-Life Award to Father Maxim Obukhov. The backgrounds of these four activists provide insight into the values that the World Congress of Families seeks to promote around the world.

Theresa Okafor

Okafor, from Nigeria, is the World Congress of Families Regional Director in Africa. In 2009, she was successful in bringing a World Congress of Families event to Nigeria. She is the CEO of Life League Nigeria and the director of the Foundation for African Cultural Heritage.

The Foundation for African Cultural Heritage is a coalition organization that encompasses 20 “family values” organizations such as Association of Concerned Mothers, Nigerian Association for Family Development, Doctors Health Initiative, Life League Nigeria, the Christian Association of Bishops Conference of Nigeria and the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, Nigeria. Her groups have supported and lauded Nigeria’s Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, which banned all same-sex relationships and gay people gathering in groups of two or more. The act led to the arrest of dozens of people.

The Foundation for African Cultural Heritage releasedvideos of a press conference it organized to support the bill, during which speakers called homosexuality “abhorrent” and compared it to alcoholism. At a World Congress of Families annual gathering in Madrid in 2012, Okafor speculated in a speech that Western countries advocating for gay rights in Africa were involved in a “conspiracy” to “silence Christians” with the terrorist group Boko Haram:

Unfortunately, in Nigeria where I come from, we have these fundamentalists, the Boko Haram – I’m sure you’ve heard about them in the news – bombing churches. They seem to be helping some people in Western countries who are out to silence Christians. The Boko Haram are targeting Christians in Nigeria, so you wonder if there’s a conspiracy between the two worlds.

In the speech she also speculated that efforts to promote LGBT rights in Africa are “another ploy to depopulate Africa,” a sentiment she expresses repeatedly.

Okafor also has ties to the American group Family Watch International, which works to stop advances in LGBT equality and reproductive rights at the UN, cosponsoring the group’s Global Family Policy Forum in Gilbert, Arizona.

Luca Giuseppe Volonte

Luca Volonte is an Italian politician and the president of the Novae Terrae Foundation, which states on its website that it is committed to “promot[ing] human rights from the religious point of view.” The “Goals” section of the group’s mission page emphasizes its focus on contrasting Christianity with “Islamic culture.”

Volonte serves along with the National Organization for Marriage’s Brian Brown on the board of trustees of CitizenGo, an international organization that promotes petitions backing conservative positions, including opposition tosame-sexmarriage and abortion rights. In response to Target’s decision to stop segregating its toy aisles by gender, CitizenGo released a petition saying the new policy was a result of “sexual radicals ” who “want to erase distinctions between male and female, and promote transgenderism among children.”

In 2010, Volonte won the chair of the European People’s Party in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. As chair, Volonte led the successful effort to withdraw a report on "discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.”

Volonte was appointed chairman of the anti-LGBT Institute for Human Dignity, a Catholic NGO based in Rome, in 2013. The institute released a declaration defining human dignity as:

That man is made in the image and likeness of God; that this image and likeness proceeds in every single human being without exception from conception until natural death; and that the most effective means of safeguarding this recognition is through the active participation of the Christian faith in the public square.

In 2015, Novae Terrae announced a partnership with the European Large Families Confederation.

Andrea Williams

Andrea Williams is the CEO of Christian Concern, a United Kingdom based group that promotes a “Christian voice” in government. In the “About” sections of Christian Concern’s website, the organization states that it pursues these goals because “ ...in the last few decades the nation has largely turned her back on Jesus and embraced alternative ideas such as secular liberal humanism, moral relativism and sexual licence. The fruit of this is rotten, and can be seen in widespread family breakdown, immorality and social disintegration.” The organization attempts to move policy on “abortion, adoption and fostering, bioethics, marriage, education, employment, end of life, equality, family, free speech, Islamism, religious freedom, the sex trade, social issues and issues relating to sexual orientation.” Christian Concern has campaigned against numerouspieces of LGBT anti-discrimination legislation, citing that they would create discrimination against Christians.

Williams encouraged Jamaica to keep same-sex intimacy (still referred to in the country’s legal code as “buggery”) illegal at a conference organized by the Jamaican Coalition for a Healthy Society and the Christian Lawyers’ Association in Kingston that she attended with extreme American anti-LGBT activist Peter LaBarbera. At the conference, she suggested Olympic diver Tom Daley is gay because his father died, and that “sometimes a level of abuse” is responsible for one becoming gay.

Williams is the director of the Christian Concern offshoot Christian Legal Centre, whose website says it “defend[s] many Christians who have suffered for their beliefs,” in a similar fashion to the American Alliance Defending Freedom. The Christian Legal Centre has provided legal support to a woman who sued an art gallery for displaying an image of Jesus with an erection and to a man who was relieved of his position as a police officer after sending homophobic emails.

In concert with Alliance Defending Freedom, Christian Concern also runs the Wilberforce Academy, which says its aim is to “train and equip the invited students on what it means to proclaim Christ in public life.” Williams has said this on the Alliance Defense Fund:

The ADF are a fantastic organization. We have been inspired by their work and that of the Blackstone programme, which seeks to raise a new generation of lawyers to defend Christianity in the public sphere. They've got some of the best attorneys in this field and we have the great privilege of hosting them, but they don't pay anything towards the academy.

In 2010, Williams was elected to a five year term as a member of the Church of England General Synod.

Maxim Obukhov

Father Maxim Obukhov is credited by Religious Right leaders as the founder of the pro-life movement in Russia and led the effort to bring the World Congress of Families to Moscow last year. He was instrumental in convening a World Congress of Families “demographic summit” in Russia, which resulted in a statement addressed to world leaders. Part of the statement read:

We call on the governments of all nations and on international institutions to develop immediately a pro-family demographic policy and to adopt a special international pro-family strategy and action plan aimed at consolidating family and marriage, protecting human life from conception to natural death, increasing birth rates, and averting the menace of depopulation.

In 2009, Obukhov drafted an official proposal for WCF to come to Moscow, and the plan was solidified. However, the conferencewascancelled in response to backlash over President Vladimir Putin’s actions in Crimea. An “International Family Forum” sprang up in its place, and many of the same pro-family leaders from the United States and around the world were in attendance.

Obhukhov created the Zhizn Center, an organization connected with the Russian Orthodox Church that dedicates itself to the “dissemination of Christian views on questions of family and marriage” and against abortion rights . He is also secretary of the Church’s bioethics committee and an expert on bioethical issues for the Moscow Patriarchate. World Congress of Families claims the Zhizn Center runs more than 30 crisis-pregnancy centers.

Obhukvhov was part of a group established by the Duma’s committee on family, women and children in 2010 for the purpose of drafting anti-choice legislation. Parts of the legislation drafted by the group, which included no medical professionals, were used in a health reform bill signed by President Dmitry Medvedev in 2011. Proposals that did not make it into legislation attempted to end federal support of all abortion services, require that women receive the approval of their spouses before having an abortion, and require prescriptions for the morning-after pill. Obukhov opposes hormonal birth control.

Obukhov has told LifeSiteNews that he believes the Obama administration’s sanctions on Russian lawmaker Yelena Mizulina, author of the infamous “gay propaganda” ban, following the Ukraine conflict were evidence of Christian persecution. Obuhkov said, "President Obama is using the economic sanctions against Yelena Mizulina to send a very clear message to Russian Christians. There is much talk about a cold war, but President Obama has openly declared war upon Christians who oppose the culture of death both at home and abroad."

At Right Wing Watch – a project of People For the American Way – we know we’ve done our job when we’ve made the Right Wing really, really mad. So if the coverage we’ve been seeing in the right-wing media is any indication, we’ve been doing our job especially well lately. Here’s a roundup of some recent anti-endorsements:

The conservative blog Newsbusters calls Right Wing Watch PFAW’s “hit squad” in an article we couldn’t have written better ourselves. In addition to crediting PFAW with “destroying Reagan Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s reputation in the 1980s,” the article touts some of Right Wing Watch’s greatest successes – including its coverage of the anti-choice and anti-gay HGTV stars David and Jason Benham. Newsbusters correctly notes that Right Wing Watch broke the news when then-presidential candidate Scott Walker defended mandatory and medically unnecessary ultrasounds as “a cool thing out there” (though they incorrectly allege that the reporting “twisted” Walker’s words). And while the Newsbusters article fails to achieve its goal of discrediting Right Wing Watch, it does provide many great examples of Right Wing Watch’s reporting appearing in major news outlets like USA Today, MSNBC, Salon, Slate, and the Huffington Post.

Despite messianic rabbi Jonathan Cahn’s doomsday prophecy, the United States didn’t experience a cataclysmic disaster this past September, which must have rattled right-wing pundits like Glenn Beck and Pat Robertson who have spent months anticipating it. Right Wing Watch pointed out that the prophecy didn’t come true -- much to the frustration of WND, a Religious Right news site that Right Wing Watch has been reading and covering for years. WND took specific issue with Right Wing Watch blogger Brian Tashman, who had reported on the Cahn prophecy, for his “slander” and “lack of truthfulness.” It’s not clear how pointing out that the world didn’t end last month qualifies as slanderous, but you can read the rest of WND’s criticism here.

Right Wing Watch might consider outlandish criticism from the Radical Right to be a sign of a job well done, but many on the Right feel the same way about a mention on Right Wing Watch. Ann Corcoran, an anti-refugee resettlement advocate, has made several appearances on Right Wing Watch for her xenophobic remarks about Syrian refugees, posted on her blog that she considered the coverage to be “a great honor” and “a goal to work toward” for other right-wing activists.

Right Wing Watch is as committed as ever to monitoring and exposing the activities of the right-wing movement – no matter what they might say about us. Read more Right Wing Watch coverage.

Root recalled a detailed story about being refused an off-menu item at a restaurant in Great Britain, which he attributed to the lack of tipping, whereas tipping is “what makes America great.”

This led him back to the topic of the fantasy sports investigation. “Socialism is just filtering into everything we do in this country,” he said, “and to go after a business that’s a hot business, fantasy sports, simply because a bunch of people are making millions of dollars is more of the jealousy of the Obama administration against anyone who actually profits in the United States of America.”

Crutcher’s claims fell apart when his key witness admitted at a congressional hearing that he had lied about witnessing “profiteering by fetal-tissue providers.” The Omaha World-Herald reported at the time:

[U]nder questioning from the committee, Alberty admitted that he had lied in previous statements made to Life Dynamics, an anti-abortion group in Texas. In a videotape produced by Life Dynamics, a disguised Alberty charged that he had witnessed profiteering by fetal-tissue providers, among a number of charges he later denied in a sworn affidavit.

Alberty also admitted receiving more than $10,000 from Life Dynamics.

On Thursday, Alberty contradicted himself repeatedly, at one point telling the committee he didn't remember if he had put on a dress to disguise himself in the Life Dynamics video.

"When I was under oath, I told the truth," Alberty told the committee. "Anything I said on a videotape when I wasn't under oath is a different story."

Another focus of Life Dynamics’ “investigation” was a middle-man whom they said profited from fetal tissue after obtaining it from a Planned Parenthood facility in Kansas. Planned Parenthood was never implicated in any wrongdoing, and federal prosecutors never found evidence to bring charges against the man Life Dynamics had targeted.

In an in-depth interview with the “Catholic Answers Focus” podcast last week, Daleiden recalled that in 2010 he had a “very detailed” three-hour conversation with Crutcher about this failed sting operation, from which he came away determined to copy Crutcher’s actions, only this time he would be better prepared to confront the “enemy” of Planned Parenthood.

“I felt like it deserves to have a very detailed and sophisticated exposé done about it again, and done in a way that would go even farther than what was done before and do it in a way that wouldn’t allow it to just be ignored or swept under the rug,” he said, “so that was the original inspiration.”

“So I think that Mark Crutcher did groundbreaking work and I think that it was a great victory just for him to get the information out that he did,” Daleiden said. “But I think definitely you always want to learn from how something was done before and if, I wouldn’t say so much mistakes, but just areas where the enemy pushed back really hard and kind of what the best tactics of the enemy were, and wanting to make sure we could learn from the past and have a way to neutralize those in the future.”

He added that as well as learning about “the best tactics of the enemy,” he decided to focus on Planned Parenthood “so that nobody could deny that this was a Planned Parenthood problem and so Planned Parenthood would have to be held to account for their actions.”

Cheryl Sullenger, a top official at Operation Rescue, another extreme anti-choice group that Daleiden turned to for help, has said that Daleiden came into the project sharing “our vision for obtaining criminal prosecutions” of Planned Parenthood officials in order to “bring an end” to “the abortion industry in America.”

Six states have so far closed investigations into Daleiden’s claims, finding no wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood.

Those claims have not held up to scrutiny and last week Planned Parenthood announced that its two remaining clinics that legally accept reimbursement for fetal tissue donation will no longer do so in order to completely dispel the rumor that the organization is profiting off donations for medical research.

But, of course, with anti-choice activists Planned Parenthood just can’t win. After the anti-abortion movement spent months claiming that Planned Parenthood’s acceptance of reimbursements for fetal tissue was a big money-making scheme, one Religious Right group is now claiming that the organization’s decision to stop accepting those reimbursements is an even bigger money-making scheme.

In its weekly email newsletter on Friday, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission acknowledged that Planned Parenthood could never have made much money from tissue donation even if it was breaking the law and alleged that the organization is now absorbing all the costs of tissue donation because “they can make even more money by not accepting direct reimbursements.”

PP believes that by giving up the reimbursements, they can win a PR victory by convincing the public that this was merely an indirect attack on abortion rights.

The second, unstated, reason is likely that PP knows they can make even more money by not accepting direct reimbursements. Less than 1 percent of PP’s clinics earn any money by being compensated for fetal tissue donations. But now PP can solicit funding from 100 percent of their donor base to cover the cost of the fetal remains they provide to researchers.

It not surely no coincidence that PP announced the policy just before they begin their fundraising campaign for end-of-year donations. By overhyping their role in fetal tissue research—what they call “this limited but important work”—they will convince their donor base that they have made a noble sacrifice that will require compensation. Overall, PP is likely to make much more money from pro-abortion advocates by fundraising off this issue than they ever made in direct compensation from actual fetal tissue donations.

Earlier this week, the Justice Department announced the creation of a new position for a “domestic terrorism counsel” to fight homegrown extremism, which DOJ national security head John Carlin said could be “motivated by any viewpoint on the full spectrum of hate — anti-government views, racism, bigotry, anarchy and other despicable beliefs” because “when it comes to hate and intolerance, no single ideology governs."

So, naturally, WorldNetDaily reported on the story today with the headline “New Obama Czar Will Hunt ‘Right-Wing’ Extremists” and interviewed a pair of right-wing activists who warned that it is all a plot to “target” and “intimidate” political opponents in the “old Soviet model.”

Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton told WND that the new position will “become the vehicle through which the Justice Department can target those who oppose the Obama agenda,” adding, “If a totalitarian leftist had to write a description for a government operation to suppress his enemies, this would be it.”

The Rutherford institute’s John Whitehead, meanwhile, warned that the DOJ will use the new position to go after gun owners, veterans, “abortion activists, tea-party activists [and] constitutionalists.”

Somehow, this reaction does not surprise us. After all, when the Department of Homeland Security released a report on domestic right-wing terrorism back in 2009, right-wing groups raised a stink, leading to the “gutting” of the DHS unit investigating such attacks.

As the Obama administration comes down to its final months in office, look for more brazen, racially charged steps that target law-abiding American citizens who express political views that don’t line up with those of the administration, Fitton said.

“This is going to become the vehicle through which the Justice Department can target those who oppose the Obama agenda,” he said. “This is a solution in search of a problem.”

…

“The fantasy of right-wing extremists trying to overthrow the government has always been a liberal fantasy,” Fitton said. “They write books off it. They make movies off it and raise money off it. Now they’re endorsing it as reality, and it’s truly frightening.”

By shifting resources away from international terrorist organizations and putting them into a new focus on domestic lone-wolf “extremists,” the Obama administration is sending a message to its enemies, Fitton said.

“The term ‘anti-government views’ ranges from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump, in my estimation. When they talk about ‘racist views,’ are they talking about La Raza (The Race), or are they talking about people opposed to the immigration crisis at our border?”

“This is a leftist fantasy,” he continued. “If a totalitarian leftist had to write a description for a government operation to suppress his enemies, this would be it.”

..

“Anybody with a gun now, in my opinion, is an extremist, at least as viewed by this government,” Whitehead said. “You’re going to be watched. Be careful what you say on Facebook. The wrong kind of joke will put you on the extremist list, because the government agents – I will tell you this – they do not have a sense of humor.”

…

If you want to see the future of law enforcement, watch the film “Minority Report,” a drama about “pre-crime” fighting police engaged 24/7 with a population addicted to social media and the Internet, Whitehead said.

“They’re already saying ‘we’re going against violent extremists,’ but who are they?” Whitehead said. “Well automatically under the Obama administration you are an extremist if you own a gun.”

…

“So we’re dealing with an entity that has no idea about representative government. They’ve made up their mind who constitutes an extremist, and an extremist is a terrorist, an enemy of the state,” Whitehead said. “Veterans are already on the list, as are abortion activists, tea-party activists, constitutionalists. I know the vets are because we have them calling us every day.

“These are all things that should be debated openly, but now you’re having cities moving into U.N. programs, police being federalized and internationalized and now targeting their own people as enemies of the state,” he added. “I’m a student of history, and I see us repeating history. We’re following the Chinese model, which is basically the old Soviet model.”

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., joined South Carolina radio host Vince Coakley yesterday to discuss the first Democratic presidential debate, where he said the candidates were “all trying to outdo each other in their disdain for the economic system of capitalism that made us great.”

The Republican presidential candidate linked Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist in the mold of Northern European countries, to the murderous communist regimes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, saying that “most of the times when socialism has been tried” there “has been mass genocide of people or any of those who object to it.”

“It amazes me and it actually kind of scares me,” Paul said. “I’ve been spending more time going after Bernie and socialism because I don’t want America to succumb to the notion that there’s anything good about socialism. I think it’s not an accident of history that most of the times when socialism has been tried that attendant with that has been mass genocide of people or any of those who object to it. Stalin killed tens of millions of people. Mao killed tens of millions of people. Pol Pot killed tens of millions of people. When you have a command economy, when everything is dictated from one authority, that’s socialism, but it doesn’t come easily to those who resist it.”

Whatever one might think of Sanders’ political ideology, there is a vast gulf between the kind of socialist policies he is discussing and the total economic and social control imposed by communist dictatorships.

Trump’s description of his plan lacked details, but, of course, centered on the great “deals” that he would cut with health care providers, meaning that most people would choose private insurance because they would have a “great plan” and everybody else would go to hospitals for care “because you make a deal with these hospitals so they can’t rip off the country.”

“We can make a deal with hospitals where the people who can’t buy their plan — which will not be that much because everyone’s going to want to be private, everybody’s going to want to buy these plans — but we can make a deal where we take care of people with hospitals,” he said.

Trump repeatedly defended the necessity of universal health care, saying, “I don’t want to see people dying in the streets,” but insisted that what he was advocating was not “socialized medicine” because “I don’t put a label on it.”

“I keep talking about the Republicans, they have heart, but some people would [say], oh, is this socialized medicine?” he said. “It’s just, it’s not, I don’t put a label on it.”

Al Mohler, an influential Southern Baptist leader and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is releasing a new book this month that urges conservative Christians to boycott gay people’s weddings — including their own children’s — lest they signal “moral approval” of the marriage. But at the same time, Mohler is under attack from some on the Religious Right for being not harsh enough on LGBT issues because he recently criticized “ex-gay” therapy, saying that many people will face a “lifelong battle” with “these patterns of sin” rather than being easily changed.

Among those slamming Mohler is Americans for Truth About Homosexuality’s Peter LaBarbera, who told Janet Mefferd last week that Mohler was leading a “retreat” in the culture war because he suggested that sexual orientations are something that exist.

“Al Mohler has given credence to the idea of homosexual sexual orientation,” LaBarbera said. “And we know that sexual orientation is a political construct, it’s something that’s helped the homosexual movement advance. Because if people feel that people who struggle with homosexuality have a natural so-called orientation, they of course believe that they’re not really responsible for their behavior as much as they would be for any other sin. So, once again, we start treating this particular sin as a special sin needing all sorts of special terminology and semantics and caveats that are not biblical. And I think he’s starting to go down that route and it troubles me, because he’s probably regarded as the leading intellectual, one of them, in the evangelical Christian movement."

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is a leader of the GOP’s anti-immigrant and restrictive voting efforts, and has been trying out some of his most extreme ideas in his home state.

Kobach helped to push through one of the nation’s most restrictive voting laws, requiring people registering to vote to produce documentation of citizenship, such as a birth certificate. Because of this law, 36,000 people in Kansas have started voter registrations but not completed them, and now Kobach is purging that list of people who haven’t followed up to complete their registrations.

An analysis by The New York Times of the list of voters showed that more than half of them were under 35, and 20 percent were from 18 to 20 years old. Fifty-seven percent of the people on the list did not declare a party; 23 percent were Democrats; and 18 percent were Republicans. The vast majority — 90 percent — had never voted before.

“This disproportionately hits 18- to 24-year-olds,” said Jamie Shew, a Democrat and the county clerk for Douglas County, Kan. “For a lot of them, they say, ‘I’m not going to worry about it.’ They’re busy and this is just one more thing to do.”

Under the law, which was passed in 2011, registrants must prove citizenship by producing a document from an approved list, which includes birth certificates, passports and naturalization records. They may bring the document to a county clerk’s office or email a photo of it. Under Mr. Kobach’s new rule, if they fail to do so, they would be removed from the voters list after 90 days. Residents can try to register again even after being removed from the list.

The 36,000 people on the list represent about 2 percent of the state’s 1.7 million registered voters. The Wichita Eagle reported in September that more than 16 percent of people who have tried to register to vote since the law went into effect in January 2013 have been placed on the list.

On yesterday’s “Washington Watch” program, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins and Jerry Boykin reacted to Army Secretary John McHugh’s recent statement that if “your objective is true and pure equality” in the military, then women will eventually be required to register for the draft.

Perkins and Boykin were, unsurprisingly, not too happy about this.

“Let me go on record, General,” Perkins said. “I like the difference between the sexes. I like the smell of perfume. Look, I’m fine with wearing cologne but I don’t want to smell some other cologne. I like perfume. I like the fact that there’s a difference between men and women. In western civilization for the longest, we have not only protected that but we’ve elevated in many ways the status of women in our society by treating them differently.”

“This is the natural progression as we’ve seen the emasculation of our culture. And that’s what’s really behind this, is to say there’s no difference between men and women,” he added.

In an interview with Iowa talk radio host Jan Mickelson yesterday, GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee falsely suggested that the U.S. is not thoroughly vetting the Syrian refugees it is accepting, saying that unlike Vietnamese refugees who were resettled in the U.S. after the Vietnam War, Syrians are merely seeking U.S. benefits because they are “not living a very fancy life.”

The U.S. should not let Syrian refugees “get on a plane and send them to the United States and be in a culture that they’re totally unprepared for, and perhaps we’re unprepared for why they’re coming,” Huckabee said.

“This country is willing to take in people who are desperate,” he said. “I remember after the Vietnam War, Arkansas took in an enormous number of Vietnamese refugees. And guess what? Those folks worked their tails off, they learned English, their kids ended up becoming the valedictorians half the time. But that was because they wanted to come to America, they wanted freedom, and they decided that they wanted to be part of this great country. And they have certainly succeeded at that, owning businesses and prospering. But just to say that if somebody is not living a very fancy life and they’d like to come here because we’ve given them free benefits, no, we can’t do that.”